


A thing of beauty (is a joy forever)

by minkhollow



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Episode Related, Gen, POV Minor Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-31
Updated: 2011-07-31
Packaged: 2017-10-22 00:24:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minkhollow/pseuds/minkhollow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You have a gift," Manny says, pressing a camera into Perry's hands.  "It would be a great shame if the world lost that."</p>
            </blockquote>





	A thing of beauty (is a joy forever)

**Author's Note:**

> NB: MAJOR spoilers for "Age Before Beauty" herein. (And a tiny one for "Where and When.")
> 
> This is a story I've wanted to write for a while now; it's not often, given the show's perspective, that we get to see the full backstory of the person who has the Artifact, and this one in particular fascinates me to no end.  
> I am not Syfy; I just borrow to write things like this.

**Paris, France  
1934**

Everyone and their cat seems to be going to Paris these days. Perry’s been here for a month, and he has yet to sort out why.

While the near-drowning immersion in the language has caught him up quite a bit, he still barely knows enough French to get by - but he definitely knows ‘there’s no jobs to be had’ when he hears it, no matter what the language. Everyone in London was always telling him to go where the work was; they might have considered the fact that there’s no work anywhere, right now, before giving him that sage advice.

Above all, he does not want to give up. His father spent hours ranting about how Perry was mad if he thought he could make a career out of photography - and then said it all again the next day, in Spanish. He wants to have something to rub in his father’s face, but he doesn’t know if Paris is where he’s going to find it, and he doesn’t have the money to go anywhere else.

But just when he thinks he’s going to have to go home with his tail between his legs, so to speak, he catches a snatch of conversation. It’s in English, which is what gets his attention first; it’s about developing film, which is what holds his interest. He keeps an ear on the conversation and spends some of the last of his money on a sandwich, trying not to look like he’s eavesdropping on the couple. Before long, the woman makes her excuses and leaves, and Perry, always one to pounce on an opportunity, decides to talk to the man before he has a chance to leave himself.

“Excuse me,” he says, trying not to fidget with his camera (he could pawn it for a little more money, but that would entirely defeat the purpose), “I couldn’t help hearing that you were discussing photography, and I’ve been wanting to learn a bit more about the art. You wouldn’t happen to be looking for an assistant, would you?”

The man regards Perry for a moment; he tries not to blanch under the scrutiny.

“At the moment, no,” he finally says, “but I do need someone to model for a project I’m working on, and you would fit the bill quite nicely. And if you happen to learn a thing or two about photography techniques along the way, then who’s to stop you?”

Perry grins, even as he’s kicking himself for not having thought of putting his own face in front of the camera first. “Thank you, sir. I’d greatly appreciate it.”

He doesn’t know how the shock of finding out he’s modeling for Man Ray, of all people, doesn’t kill him, but somehow he makes it through. The project in question takes several weeks, and Perry’s really not sure how much of himself he’ll be able to recognise in whatever the final medium is, but it hardly matters; he knows, and Manny (as he insisted Perry call him by the end of the second week) knows, and that’s more than enough.

Manny knows people who know people - or, more often, are the people to know themselves - and by the end of the project, he’s contacted a friend who’s willing to put in a good word for Perry in New York, before she leaves America herself. Perry’s a bit dubious about the idea, at first, mostly because he knew he was leaving London but never thought he’d be so far from home. But really, there’s nothing to stop him, and if he has a way into professional photography, he’d be a fool not to take the chance.

“You have a gift,” Manny says, the night before he’s due to leave, pressing a camera into Perry’s hands. “It would be a great shame if the world lost that.”

“Manny, I can’t take your camera away from you--”

“I have more where that came from,” he interrupts, waving a hand as if to knock Perry’s concerns out of the way. “Besides, you need something better than that old thing you brought from London.”

It’s clear he’s not going to win, so Perry takes the camera with him.

 **Los Angeles, California  
1947**

Seeing Manny again (especially as one of the people to know, this time around) is wonderful, though the long look he gives Perry puts him in mind of that first scrutiny back in Paris.

Finally, Manny shakes his head. “I thought you would have worked it out by now,” he says, then smiles. “In any case, it’s good to see you again.”

Perry asks more than once that day what it is he’s meant to have worked out, but Manny never explains; some days the man is every bit as cryptic as his art.

A week later, Perry works it out, quite by accident. He doesn’t have any work that day, so he’s taking pictures for the fun of it. On a day like this, anything that catches his attention is fair game; he takes a picture of an elderly stray dog, and moves on to a pair of abandoned kittens down the block.

After he takes the second picture, a golden light surrounds the kittens and leaves a pair of ancient-looking cats in its wake. Before he manages to stop staring at the cats, a puppy bounds over; if not for the age, it would be a dead ringer for the dog he’d photgraphed first.

Perry’s stunned, to say the least. He all but runs back to his hotel room and dives into the closet he’s set up as a makeshift darkroom for the duration of his stay, to see what happened. From the look of the film, he’d forgotten to advance the film after taking the picture of the dog; it appears the double exposure is what triggered the changes. Perry’s never heard of a camera capable of anything like this, but all the same, it doesn’t quite surprise him that Manny would come up with it.

The cats will probably be dead soon; strays or not, they were barely old enough to know how to fend for themselves. But the implications of what happened are far more intriguing to Perry than a couple of abandoned cats. Could the camera do the same thing to people? Could he use it on himself? _Should_ he use it on himself?

“Of course you should,” Manny says, when Perry tells him about it the next day. “That _was_ my idea. As I said at the time, you have a gift. I would have left it in Lee’s more than capable hands, but...” He trails off, smiling a little. “She said she had no interest in it.”

“I don’t know her half as well as you do, of course, but she does seem determined to make her own mark on the world.” And if her Blitz photographs - to say nothing of the concentration camps - were any indication, Perry thinks she’s succeeded.

“That she is. Anyway, that’s not the sort of thing I want to fall into the wrong hands.”

“I can imagine. How did you do it?”

Manny shrugs. “If I knew that, I would tell you. That said, I thought you might get some good use out of it.”

 **Calcutta, India  
1961**

Someone’s following him.

Someone’s been following him since he did his last self-portrait back in Tokyo, actually. Perry can’t fathom why the Indian man - Native American, not one of the locals - has given chase this far and this long, but one thing is abundantly clear: He wants Manny’s camera. It’s the only thing Perry has that’s worth that kind of trouble.

Equally clear to Perry: Like hell if he’s letting some stranger get hold of Manny’s camera and do God alone knows what with it. At least in his own hands, both he and Manny know exactly what’s going on.

After his first go (which was a very close call), he did a little experimenting and found out he could hold off the aging process until he ran the photos through the developer, if he developed them both at once. Manny said he wished he’d thought of that; it’s the highest praise Perry could have asked for. He’s been getting by on that since then, to keep anyone from getting suspicious - but it hasn’t worked on his pursuer.

Perry doesn’t know who this man is or what he knows that the world at large doesn’t, but he’s getting bloody tired of being the object of a chase.

After a long, hot week in Calcutta, he thinks he’s thrown the man off, at least for now. How long his luck is going to hold, he has no idea, but he feels like he can breathe again.

 **Paris, France  
1976**

Perry’s just used the camera for the fourth time when he hears that Manny died.

He’s had to keep a low profile since he made up his mind the first time, as sooner or later - especially in the world of fashion photography - people would notice that he seemed to be aging backward. But times have changed; he’s not unemployed anymore, he’s freelance, and he made sure he had a fair bit saved up before he left his steady job.

The world’s changed in more ways than one. The music got better; the clothes got worse; the music is getting worse again; everything seems to be happening faster and faster these days; the finished photos, after his self-portraits, seem to be reflecting his cumulative age rather than how old he appears to be when he starts out. But none of those are what’s tripping him up now.

Manny’s gone and Perry misses him terribly already.

He goes to Montparnasse for the funeral, of course, and if anyone thinks he’s a bit on the young side to be there they don’t comment on it. Perry’s glad for that, at least; after all, he’s got an important legacy of Manny’s to carry on.

 **Milan, Italy  
1993**

Perry never thought the day would come that he was bored half to death at a fashion show, but it has.

The music is terrible, the clothes don’t feel all that innovative after everything he’s seen, and Lee must be spinning in her grave over how bloody skinny the girls following in her footsteps are expected to be, these days. It’s almost enough to make him consider freelancing of an entirely more pedestrian sort, people’s wedding photos or something; as much as fashion photography is his world and always has been, he can’t stand what it’s become.

But then Romana takes the runway and his heart skips a beat.

He’d heard there was supposed to be a new girl tonight, but hadn’t thought much of it; there are new girls every five minutes, anymore, and most of them are replaced by the next new girl at the next show. But Romana won’t be one of those girls, he can tell. She makes the runway hers, and it’s a glorious sight.

(He does take a picture of her, but not for the usual sort of personal reasons - just so he has something of her to keep for himself.)

Perry follows Romana’s shows for over a decade before he gets the opportunity to talk to her. By then, they no longer look like equals; her face is already showing too much wear from the stress of the job and all the time she spends trying to keep tan. She’s also nowhere near as pleasant to talk to as he’d hoped, but the more cynical part of him - the part that’s been doing this for sixty years - expected nothing less. When models take off the way Romana has, the fame goes to their heads, more often than not.

But she had a positively gorgeous smile, before she started faking it all the time, and so Perry assumes she must have a heart in there somewhere; all he has to do is figure out how to get to it.

He could offer to use Manny’s camera on her, make her young again, but he suspects she would balk at the idea of having to give up her place in the limelight, which she would almost certainly have to do; the change would be far too drastic. His only other lead comes from Romana’s repeated rejections of him - and he can’t see everyone shying away from the chance to lose a few decades.

If it’s money and power Romana wants in a man, then money and power she shall get.

 **New York City  
2010**

Even before the man - at least thirty years his junior; what on earth gives him the right to tell Perry what’s best for him? - turns Manny’s camera on him and leaves with it, Perry knows the game is up. He’s done too much too quickly, left too conspicuous a trail of bodies in his wake, and, apparently, singled out a girl with formidable allies. He briefly wonders if any of them know the man who chased him for so long, but finds it unlikely. That was nearly fifty years ago, after all.

Perhaps he should have offered Romana a second chance at youth after all and had done with it.

He suspects he’ll be dead before long - perhaps not as quickly as the girls he developed out of their youth, as he can think of no reason he’d come down with silver nitrate poisoning from a simple double exposure, but he’s already lived past when his parents died by a couple of decades, at least. Perhaps it’s just as well; in his current state, no one’s likely to hire him, and besides, he can’t abide digital cameras. They make it far too easy for anyone to think they’re good.

In any case, he’d like to think he’s had a good run at it. He can only hope Manny wouldn’t think poorly of his work.

**Author's Note:**

> Lee refers to Lee Miller, an early fashion model, photographer and photojournalist who worked closely with Man Ray in the early '30s. From the research I did for this story (not least from the fact that she told Man Ray she was his new assistant when he wasn't even looking for one), she was an awesome lady who probably has an Artifact or two of her own kicking around in the W13 'verse.
> 
> Also, for returning readers: You're not imagining things, the POV character's name changed since I first wrote this. Turned out I had Camera Guy mixed up with Designer Guy, and that's kiiiiind of something that merits fixing.


End file.
